Generally, chip resistors produced by thin-film technology have resistance elements exhibiting good characteristics, and variations in quality among the chip resistors are small. Hence, resistors of this kind are used in various electronic apparatuses. According to one method of mounting such a chip resistor equipped with thin-film elements on a motherboard, the resistor is stuck to the motherboard, and electrical connection is made by wire-bonding. In this case, no lateral electrodes are formed.
Referring now to FIGS. 1 (a) and 1 (b), there is shown a chip resistor provided with thin-film elements of this kind. This resistor includes thin-film electrodes 1, a thin-film resistor 2, and an insulating substrate 3. When the configuration shown in FIG. 1 is connected to a motherboard, an inefficient manual soldering operation is required. This presents serious problems in that it runs counter to the recent trend of the industry where electrical connection of components is made by dip soldering or reflow soldering to improve the efficiency of the operation.
Accordingly, in an attempt to accommodate dip soldering or reflow soldering, lateral electrodes 4' (see FIG. 2) have been sometimes produced by a thin-film technology such as evaporation in a vaccuum, electron-beam evaporation, or sputtering. However, this method is uneconomical.
According to a still other method which is extensively used, films are deposited by printing metalglaze paste or by simlar means, and then the films are fired to form lateral electrodes. This method, however, needs a high temperature for firing operation, thus deteriorating both the low resistance temperature coefficient of the thin-film resistor and the high stability of the resistance which characterize the thin-film resistor.